We’re Done, thanks for the memories!

That’s all folks. It has been a great joy to be a part of Expository Thoughts over the last few years but we have had a massive change of focus that has caused us to see preaching in a whole new light. The fact is we no longer think preaching is worth it. Seriously, who wants to sit for an hour on a Sunday morning and listen to someone else talk?

We agree with Doug Pagitt who has written:

Any preaching practice that results in less collective interaction and building of one another should be used very sparingly and abandoned as soon as possible (Preaching Re-Imagined, 26).

Pagitt has been saying this for years and we are saddened it has taken us this long (two thousand years) to see his wisdom. Of course others before him tried to tell us this. Fred Craddock wrote way back in 1969 that “Expository preaching has been found guilty of archaism, sacrificing the present to the past” (As One Without Authority, 17). But the real prophet was Fosdick who asked, “Could any procedure be more surely predestined to dullness and futility? . . .Nobody else who talks to the public so assumes that the vital interests of people are located in the meaning of words spoken two thousand years ago.”

We know the implications of this are huge. Maybe Pagitt was right, “So our sermons are not lessons that precisely define belief so much as they are stories that welcome our hopes and ideas and participation” (Church-Re-Imagined, 166). He also noted that, “It seems to me that this call to communal spiritual formation challenges us to re-imagine the gospel itself” (Ibid., 31).

I see now that its not only preaching that needs to be re-imagined but the gospel as well. Who would have thought that they were connected? Thanks for stopping by, see you on the flipside.

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14 responses to this post.

This type of thinking has leaked into the conservative evangelical church as well. This concept of dialogue teaching (if not held in check) can destroy preaching altogether. I said i was going to post some thoughts on this topic a while back and i still intend to do so.

Caleb, your too small minded. you sound like a TR! You are obviously a slave to Enlightenment thinking and not Scripture. Pagitt noted that “In reality preaching as speaching [i.e., expository] is quite new. In fact, it is the creation of Enlightenment Christianity” (Preaching Re-Imagined, 60).